September 2004 Archives

The first sign of the overnight take-over came when Charles Krauthammer led off with this morning's column in the Post charging Sen. Kerry with being insufficiently respectful and supportive of America's traditional allies.

Confirmation of the scope of the takeover came later in the afternoon when President Bush denounced Kerry for dissing American allies.

The Speakeasy support phone number have a "Speakeasy Voice" option in the automated menu crap now. Are they building a VoIP service?

I'm thinking of switching from Vonage to BroadVoice to use their "Bring your own device" service. I have a TDM400P card that'd be fun to get setup with Asterisk again; the closed Vonage box is really no fun.

I'd use VoicePulse Connect for calls to Europe as BroadVoice's rates to cell phones are Really Really bad (more than twice as much as VoicePulse).

As has been speculated, today we are announcing lots of new stuff. For complete specs see the various Nikon web sites around the world, but the basics:

D2X
The D2X is our new "flagship" camera, a 12.4MP/5fps DX format CMOS sensor digital SLR. Replacing the D1X as our top end camera, the D2X looks and works much like the existing D2H, but has some great new features. (Pricing and availability - TBA)

Here in Spain, we don't feel as if we are at war, because we aren't. And neither are the inhabitants of the United States, however vociferously many Americans may insist that they are. War is something else entirely. No semi-normal life can be led while a war is going on. The Madrilenians who lived through the siege of their city from 1936 to 1939 know that very well. The survivors of the daily bombardments of London during the Second World War know it, too. And those Americans who participated in that war know it also.

But there is no war against terrorism. There can be no such thing against an enemy that remains dormant most of the time and is almost never visible. It's simply another of life's inevitable troubles, and all we can do as we continue to combat it is repeat Cervantes's famous phrase, "Paciencia y barajar": "Have patience, and keep shuffling the cards."

I want to order for some items from your
store to my store and the shipment will be international to
africa(nigeria) mail me back for the type of payment you
accept and the list of items that i want.your responce is
needed urgently.

How can anyone possible fall for that? "Mail me back the list of items that I want". How about a big wire cutter for your phone line so you will stop sending this junk? It's the special no-rubber version which will give you a big thrill if you try it on the power line too!

I'm working on the new mailing list system for perl.org. Want to test? Email somelist-subscribe@empty.us to subscribe to the test list, somelist-digest-subscribe@empty.us to subscribe to the digest version. Email somelist-help@empty.us for more commands.

If you subscribe, prepare to get a bunch of test mails, of course. :-) Also, if you subscribe, feel free to send test mails to the list.

Sverything should be working like a regular ezmlm list. The initial version (where it is at now) is just a system for managing the list configuration in database and for replacing all the .qmail-* files with one(!) .qmail-default file calling one program. It's also written so we can make qmail (or another mailer) just write to a Maildir and have Ballistic pick up the mails from there (it emulates qmail-local / qmail-command). It's great.

(if you are curious, then the code is in Subversion, use guest/guest for the login. No documentation yet and I wholeheartedly will not recommend that you try using it just yet).

It's fascinating to see how the mail server logs for the perl.org list server has changed over the years. Mostly because of all the new greylisting and rate limiting software. We don't mind the extra noise and server load on our side, qmail deals with it very efficiently. It's sad though to see all the broken software blocking our mail knowing there's someone on the other side who (presumably) wanted to get it but can't.

Greylisting software that gives us a temporary failure on the same mail for almost 2 weeks? A few other examples from the last hours of log files.

gmx.net / gmx.de's SPF checker is broken. Does anyone know a clueful admin there? If so, please tell them to fix their mail server if they want mail from the perl.org lists.

delivery 1875690: failure: 213.165.64.100 does not >
like recipient.
Remote host said: 553 5.7.1 {mx002} The recipient does >
not accept mails from 'perl.org' over foreign mailservers.
553_5.7.1 According to the domain's SPF record your host >
'63.251.223.186' is not a designated sender.
Giving up on 213.165.64.100.

Other domains / services that are blocking us includes gawab.biz, bpsc.com.pl, I think those are because our new IP block from internap is in some blacklist.

There are also some exceptionally stupid mailers that are blocking mail from us because the mail server says "HELO $somename" where $somename isn't the same name as the PTR record for the IP address gives.

Mostly I don't care, but it nags me that some people can't get the list mail or gets it slowly because of their mail administrators or server vendors. (I want to say because they use clueless mail admins or vendors, but maybe that's too harsh).